Tag Archives: Carolina

For a few years I worked for a redoubtable and stereotypical prima donna chef who was known to 86 menu items in order to force customers to order other ones; refuse to cook certain cuts of meat past a certain temperature regardless of whether it was ordered that way; deny his stock of nicer wine glasses to guests who didn’t spend an arbitrary minimum amount on their bottle; and so on. He drove his cooks like oxen and could be mercilessly hard on his floor staff as well, and harder still in affect because he didn’t throw Ramsay-ish tantrums. Instead he gave cold, calm, premeditated, dead-eyed, withering disapproval. It hurt up under the sternum to receive this treatment, but there was treatment of his that hurt even worse: being ignored. Once that happened to them a few times, waiters knew their time at the restaurant was short. They’d never be fired, of course: that could result in filing for unemployment, which the chef would never risk paying. He’d simply make them feel so exiled — abetted, somewhat unintentionally, even apologetically, by the rest of the front-of-house staff, who were too terrified to risk affiliation with a pariah — that they’d quit sooner or later, often as a means of putting and end to an unhappy spell working the restaurant’s Siberia section, which of course included Table 13.

After UNC beat Duke in Chapel Hill last Thursday night, Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski was asked about shooting guard Grayson Allen’s low scoring output. Krzyzewski began his answer like so: “Trevon…” Then he tailed off and rephrased his response: “Grayson had to handle the ball a lot.” He didn’t mention Trevon Duval again.